


What Lies Beneath

by TheSkyLarkin



Series: The Gap in the Doorway AU [2]
Category: Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputation, Buried Alive, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Mentioned Aldebrand Vector (OC), Mentioned Foxglove Meadows (OC), Permanent Injury, Whump, Whumptober 2020, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:56:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26812519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSkyLarkin/pseuds/TheSkyLarkin
Summary: “The Gap in the Doorway” AU: Bracken’s revised backstory, or the accident in Broadleaf that changed everything. Takes place before the events of the main story.Challenge: Whumptober 2020Prompts: No. 4 - “Running Out of Time” “Buried Alive” “Collapsed Building”See End Notes for comprehensive warnings/tags
Relationships: Bracken Meadows & Trey & Zip Vector, Bracken Meadows & Zip Vector
Series: The Gap in the Doorway AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946533
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	What Lies Beneath

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [a-cup-of-unrealitea](https://a-cup-of-unrealitea.tumblr.com/)/[sageandfoolishwisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageandfoolishwisdom/pseuds/sageandfoolishwisdom), [frelioan](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/frelioan)/[fairyneko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairyneko), and MemoriesoftheAlhambra ([Tumblr](https://memoriesofthealhambra.tumblr.com/)/[Ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemoriesoftheAlhambra/pseuds/MemoriesoftheAlhambra)) for beta reading!

Without warning, a loud klaxon blares throughout the unfinished Treehouse, the ear-splitting sound bouncing off the gleaming metallic walls with half-built constructs precariously jutting out. The automated alarm—still in its roughest prototype phase—makes a series of clicking noises as the software attempts to determine exactly what the problem is supposed to be, then calls out in a cold, robotic voice:

“DANGER – Current structural integrity of platform 6-S at... twenty percent. Please evacuate the— DANGER – C— structural integrity— at ten— fiv—”

“Bracken! Get out of there, now!” A shrill, familiar voice screams from the platform directly across from her.

The engineer _feels_ the whine of straining metal above her before she hears it. Impossible—the quality of all the building materials Trey has managed to acquire on their budget was excellent. All the construction up to this point has gone smoothly and, most importantly, she’s run all of the calculations _herself_ …

Bracken looks up just in time to see the support beams above her buckle with a thunderous snap, sending the entire structure hurtling downwards. She doesn’t even get a chance to scream as tens of tons of metal and glass from the broken platform rains down on her with a deafening boom that shakes the entire Treehouse. The whole world goes dark.

* * *

By the age of seven years old, Bracken Meadows had already learned how to identify (with reasonable accuracy) the cause of death for every human skeleton she ran into during the archaeological expeditions that her parents took her on—not that that was particularly impressive for a Meadows. Her grandmother scoffed that Ivy, Bracken’s mother, had that skill down when she was merely _five_.

The skeletons that were littered around the uninhabited areas of the massive airship she called home had never frightened her. If anything, looking at them made her sad. What a horrible fate: to be lost and forgotten in some dark corner within the freezing bowels of the Air Destroyer _Golgotha_ , whose wreckage was more expansive than some capital cities of the Great Kingdoms! She’d rather be curled up next to Zip by the boilers of the Central Gatehouse running at full steam, with a cup of hot cider in her hands as Gramps explained his latest doodad he’d been tinkering with to them.

The burial custom of Woolley Fortress had always been cremation—out of necessity rather than any sort of tradition. The tundra ground outside was far too frigid to dig deep enough for a coffin (one that wouldn’t immediately then be dug up and devoured by the wild beasts that roamed the vast ice fields unchecked). And the fortress-town was too small to waste precious space on above-ground burials that could be used for the living. Plus—as Old Man Vector was so morbidly fond of explaining every time he got to charr a corpse or two (one of his lesser performed duties as Chief Engineer-Magus of Woolley Fortress)—at least the poor souls got to feel warmth one last time before crumbling to ash.

When Bracken learned about the burial customs of other cultures around the world at school for the first time, the ones in which the bodies of the deceased were just buried in the ground like seeds disturbed her. The only experience the young girl who had grown up in the tundra had with farming was the terrarium capsule her grandfather had built specifically to raise emergency crops in case their access to trade with other towns was ever cut off. With no access to proper soil, the only way to grow anything in such an unforgiving climate was to use processed human waste…

“What if someone who everyone else thought was dead really wasn’t, and they got buried alive?” she asked her mother after school that day. “How would they be able to get out?”

Ivy patiently explained to her eldest daughter that, similar to the crematorium in Woolley Fortress, other cultures typically had a medical professional whose specialty was to make sure that people were dead before their burial. Of course, this was the exact moment that her husband decided to butt in with gruesome facts about what happened if someone did screw up and declare a living person dead.

Bracken had nightmares for weeks afterward (waking up her baby sister in the middle of the night more than once, which led to Laurel being exiled to the couch until morning), but she never forgot what her father had said on the subject, even decades later.

* * *

By the age of twenty-one years old, Bracken has put Woolley Fortress behind her and moved out with her best friend in order to pursue their shared dream of building up a successful tech startup. She thought she got over severing ties with her parents over her new career choice in order to follow her grandfather’s footsteps as an engineer by the time that she and Zip Vector reached Sequoia Valley, yet she spent those first few nights on Trey’s couch crying under her blanket. All the same, her childhood full of archaeological training still has a tendency to leak random facts and trivia into her brain every now and then, _especially_ at the most inconvenient moments.

This is the case as she slowly awakens to pitch blackness, with her entire body seemingly pinned in place by the rubble. She can’t move a muscle. Bracken forces herself to take shallow, steady breaths. She heard Zip call out to her just as the platform collapsed—surely he, Trey, and the rest of the construction crew must be looking for her among the wreckage now… They have to know exactly where to look for her, especially the two other main engineers of the Treehouse Project.

They’ll have her out of here in no time at all…

* * *

“When buried alive, the amount of oxygen within the space a person is trapped in determines how long they’ll survive,” her father began. “People with less body mass—like you, sweetie—take up less space, and therefore have more air than someone larger trapped in a similar space...”

* * *

To distract herself from her father’s words suddenly replaying in her head from nearly fifteen years ago, Bracken tries to take stock of her injuries, but to no avail. Every inch of her body is in hot, searing pain and it feels as though she’s getting squashed down, centimeter by centimeter (like the grapes in barrels that people stepped on to make wine at that harvest festival Trey had taken them to for their company’s first anniversary). This shouldn’t come as a surprise to her; she knows exactly how much weight is pressing down upon her right now and can theoretically calculate how much time she has left before—

‘ _No! It won’t come to that; Trey and Zip will find me first!_ ’ Bracken reassures herself as she tries to get her breathing back under control and banish those negative thoughts from her head. But another disturbing notion slowly seeps in:

The real danger is running out of air first.

* * *

“Now then, body mass isn’t the sole defining factor in how quickly a person uses up oxygen: an individual’s lung capacity also plays a part in the duration of their survival odds. For example—”

“Laurel, really!”

“This information could save our daughter’s life one day, Ivy! Where was I… Right, lung capacity: another area in which you, my dear girl, would have an advantage over the average human. Due to all of our frequent expeditions that take us deep into the ice below sea level, our whole family—including your sister once she’s old enough to join us—has had to get acclimated to lower atmospheric pressures on a semi-regular basis. So in a situation like that, we’d most likely be able to control our breathing with more finesse and use less oxygen, thereby increasing our chances of lasting long enough to be rescued.

Of course, that wouldn’t do you much good if there was no one to rescue you…”

* * *

“Zip! Trey! Where the hell are you guys!?” Bracken wants to scream. The oppressive darkness seems to be slowly grinding down into her very bones (even if her logical brain, still barely hanging on to reality, knows that gravity doesn’t work like that). She can feel something wet pooling at the base of her spine, and the faint copper smell in the air seems to indicate that it’s blood. The overwhelming pain throughout her body hasn’t dulled at all; rather, she’s growing numb to it due to the blood loss.

The air grows heavy around her—it’s getting harder and harder just to keep breathing…

* * *

“But there’s one small mercy about being buried alive, as opposed to other ways to die.”

“W-what’s that, Dad?”

“You’ll run out of air first, so you’ll already be asleep when you—”

“That’s enough, Laurel! Are you trying to give our daughter nightmares!?”

* * *

Time moves in brief flashes. She lies compressed in a dark, featureless void for what seemed like an eternity. Then suddenly everything is incredibly loud and bright—brighter than the sun glistening across the glaciers of Jack Frost’s Playground at high noon—but she can’t even summon the strength to twitch her eyelids shut. Only mere moments later, her eyes adjust to the brightness somewhat, at which point she can just make out two familiar human silhouettes in between the small army of Zip’s robots lifting away the rubble.

“Gods…” The shaky voice belongs to Trey. It’s so strange to hear this much silence from a chatterbox like Zip…

The pain coursing through Bracken’s body returns twofold, and the pool of blood she has been laying in seems to have gotten bigger. When did that happen? Someone is screaming, and she can’t even recognize that it’s her own voice due to how hoarse it sounds. A robot approaches her, clanking like loose sheet metal on the outer gates in a fierce blizzard. Before Bracken can even try to remember what the number stamped on its chest means, it stabs something into her neck. Her eyelids finally slide shut as she sinks back into the abyss of nothingness once again.

* * *

“Is she finally going to wake up this time?”

“That’s what the doctors have said.” There is a heavy pause. “Zip… who’s going to tell her?”

“I’ll do it.” Zip lets out a shaky exhale, and it briefly takes her back to when they were kids again and he got a particularly bad case of the flu one year. It settled into his lungs like a heavy stone sinking into the ocean, and they had to get a special medicine imported all the way from Goldpaw. Bracken was so sure that Zip was going to cough himself to death before it got to Woolley Fortress that she tried to help him draw up a last will and testament—something that neither of their parents approved of once they found out.

“I’m the boss around here: any workplace-related incidents are my responsibility. And… she’s my best friend. What kind of lousy, useless friend would I be if I can’t be there for her now of all times?”

‘ _What the...?_ ’

Bracken wakes up in an unfamiliar room. The walls are a clean, yet faded beige with not a hint of chrome or a crystal monitor anywhere—so this is clearly neither the under construction Treehouse nor Broadleaf Inc.’s temporary base… They must be all the way back in Trey’s old village then. That was almost half a day’s journey away on foot; her injuries must have been pretty severe for Zip and Trey to drag her all the way here.

The overwhelming pain has finally subsided to ignorable levels but once again, Bracken finds herself unable to move. This time, it’s because she’s been wrapped up under a couple of layers of blankets, which seem to be a lot heavier than they look. Whatever medicinal brew they’ve got her on must be some strong stuff—she can’t even move her hands to tear herself out of this blanket cocoon, or kick herself loose with her feet…

“Hey, you. H-how’re you feeling?” The first sign that something has gone terribly wrong reveals itself in the way that Zip approaches her. His eyes are red and puffy, and he looks like he hasn’t showered in a week. This is a look that Bracken’s seen when Zip’s been struck by a manic burst of inspiration and holes himself up in his workshop for days, only for whatever he was working on to turn out to be a bust in the end. The worrisome part is how he won’t meet her eyes and seems almost scared… of her reaction? She hasn’t been able to properly terrify him since they were schoolchildren…

“Zip, what aren’t you telling me?” Bracket tries to ask him, but all that comes out of her mouth is a weak cough. Zip tries to excuse himself to go and get her a glass of water or something, and Bracken reaches out to grab him before he can escape—

—and only sees a stump where her left hand and forearm should be. Zip turns white as a sheet and stammers at her not to panic, but she manages to free her right arm—or what should have been her right arm—from the blankets as the world begins to lurch forward… No… nonononono… this is a dream, this is just a dream, this has to be _just_ a dream—

Distantly, she can hear Trey calling for a nurse… She can feel the tears welling in her eyes. Zip is hugging her and sobbing and won’t stop apologizing, and she wants to push him away and scream at him. Why is _he_ sorry, it’s not like _he’s_ the one who’s just lost their arms, he’s not the world’s most useless Chief Engineer now… but she _can’t_ , not with the hands she _doesn’t have_ —

—legs? Did Zip just say something about her legs? No. NO. If there’s any Gods left in this _accursed fucking world_ , please say something didn’t happen to her legs too—this isn’t real, this can’t be real...

By the age of twenty-two years old, Bracken has finally faced her childhood fear, only to discover that sometimes there are crueler fates than death.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Constructive criticism is appreciated!
> 
> Facts about being buried alive come from: [this Popular Science article](https://www.popsci.com/article/science/how-long-could-you-survive-coffin-if-you-were-buried-alive/)
> 
> Triggers/Warnings: Mention of death, Suffocation, Injuries, Permanent Disfigurement, Amputations, Blood, Phantom Limb Syndrome, Panic attack


End file.
